The original issue can be found at: http://www.baptistpress.com/issue-03/06/2019
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FIRST-PERSON: LaVern told me about Jesus
by Kevin White
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
RENO, Nev. (BP) -- Church planting is not new or something special to our day of ministry. Here in Nevada and across the Southern Baptist Convention, Jesus-centered, Gospel-purposed church planting as well as church revitalization have long been at our roots.
All of this came to mind as I had the honor of attending LaVern Inzer's funeral service in Elko, Nev., in January. Some of us have known LaVern as Pastor Inzer or, like me, Reverend Inzer.
He served in the Navy during World War II in the South Pacific and had two aircraft carriers sink on him during battles. Post-war, he attended college and then Golden Gate Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary).
In 1959, he was called to Winnemucca, Nev., by a small group of people brought together by Leonard Siegel, who served all of northern Nevada at the time as director of missions.
Siegel challenged LaVern to come to northern Nevada and its 500,000 square miles to start churches. He gladly took the challenge, and at the beginning he took several side jobs to be able to pastor. He simply had a desire to share the Gospel with everyone -- from ranchers and miners to migrant workers -- and would not give up regardless of the challenge.
As he began planting churches, he became known far and wide as a circuit riding preacher much like days of old. He would travel 1,000 miles a week across northern Nevada, and many of those roads were not paved. In 1998, he was recognized as the Nevada State Citizen of the Year for his service to those in need.
Reverend Inzer possibly was the most prolific church planter in the history of Nevada Baptist Convention. One is hard-pressed to find a church in central and northeastern Nevada that LaVern Inzer did not plant or play a major role in seeing it planted.
But for me there is so much more to the story. You see, Reverend Inzer was the first person I ever heard speak about the loving grace of Jesus.
This determined man did not accept rejection when he traveled to Crescent Valley, Nev., to plant a church. He wouldn't accept rejection from my father, but continued to visit in our home. That was just the beginning of how God would use LaVern in my family to see our lives turned for Jesus.
From that first visit, little did he know that my father would surrender to preach and also plant churches. Little did he know that I, a 4-year old boy, would later surrender to preach and plant churches and now serve pastors in Nevada. How could he know that his calling would lead to my two sons' own surrender to preach, one serving with the International Mission Board and the other serving a church in Nevada.
No, he just knew the Gospel call to plant churches and held true to that call.
I will miss Reverend Inzer on this earth, but I look forward to my reunion with him in glory. But for now, with joy, I return to my roots and desire to be focused and determined to plant more churches so that the next Kevin White can hear the Gospel, maybe for the first time.
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Moore examines paradoxes in Scripture & ministry
by SBTS Communications
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP) -- The church's integrity, or internal stability, is maintained by understanding and articulating key paradoxes in the Bible, Russell Moore said in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's Norton Lectures.
While the word "integrity" often is used regarding moral character, it really represents the "holding together" of something, like a building or institution, Moore said during the Feb. 26-27 event.
This integrity is critical to the church in the 21st century, and it is expressed in Scripture primarily through paradox, said Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and former dean of Southern Seminary's school of theology whose three lectures were titled "The Mystery of Integrity: The Quest for Congruence in a Culture of Conformity."
Numerous paradoxes in Christian theology are held in tension, Moore said, such as the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ, or the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of human beings. Another important paradox, when it comes to Christian ministry, is the tension between "personal" and the "communal," Moore said. The personal nature of the Christian life, he said, must go hand-in-hand with a desire for growth in community.
"The reason that the personal and the communal have to constantly be held together is because you and I are living in a time when both are collapsing," Moore stated, describing the cost of the collapse to both the individual and community as "incredibly high."
People have not been created "for life in a hive or in a pack, but for life within a kingdom -- life within a church," he said regarding its New Testament centrality.
Yet the core paradox in Christian ministry, Moore continued, is that of "mystery" and "intelligibility" in proclamation of biblical truth. As the apostle John put it in his Gospel, the abstract and pre-incarnate word (mystery) is made clear to human beings in a narrative as the "Word made flesh" (intelligibility).
Most people do not form opinions because of logic or reason, Moore noted, but because of intuition, then finding reasons to support those intuitions. This is consistent with a biblical worldview, especially for the apostle Paul, Moore said.
In Romans 1-2, Paul argues that God has intuitively revealed Himself in every human person made in His image, but that intuition has been twisted by sin. Human beings in a fallen world are not morally neutral creatures who must be reasoned with, but rather are intuitively sinful beings who invent reasons to support their flawed intuitions.
"The word that we have been given from God is a word that addresses the rational, but in a way that is able to transcend reason itself," Moore said.
Christians can communicate this word by being conversant in narrative and literary structures, Moore said. The Bible is not a collection of propositional truth, but a grand narrative that cannot be preached as a theological or doctrinal treatise, Moore said, and it cannot be preached without a robust knowledge of the story of Scripture.
"For much of the 20th century, there was a market-driven, mostly a-theological character to American evangelicalism," Moore said. "What I would encounter in students at Southern Seminary and other places ... were people who have very strong convictions about the nature of the atonement as penal and substitutionary, but didn't know the difference between Jeroboam and Rehoboam. There were theological understandings rooted mostly in controversies -- of the Reformation era or the current era -- but not a deep familiarity with the narrative of Scripture itself."
This attention to literary structures is indispensable for teaching the Bible in Christian ministry, Moore said, not only because Christians need to know how to read texts, but because they need to read people.
"What you're going to find as you move forward into the mission field is that you are going to encounter people desperately in search of personal narrative," Moore said. "If ... you don't understand how the Bible as a story and as a text works, the problem is not just that you won't interpret the Bible rightly, but that you won't be able to interpret people rightly."
Moore explained that a "plot" is the telling of a story with the observation of causality, and Christians must pay attention to the plot of Scripture so they can explain it to another person who is looking to make sense of their own life's narrative.
"The central apologetic of the Christian faith is that everyone has to live as though life has a plot in order to find meaning," Moore said. "And the Scripture tells us why: Life is, in fact, plotted and it only makes sense in light of a coherent story of a life embedded in a coherent story of the universe."
Christians preach a message of mystery, but not a mystery that is entirely unknowable, Moore said. They speak the Gospel with intelligible, reasonable words, but in a way that speaks to the deepest longings and desires of the human soul.
"The human heart has a need for narration, logic and meaning, but it can only be a meaning that happens within the fabric of what God has given to us in intelligibility and mystery."
Audio and video from the Norton Lectures and of chapel are available at equip.sbts.edu. Moore also spoke in chapel on Feb. 26 on the topic of integrity, which can be accessed at http://news.sbts.edu/2019/02/26/moore-sbts-chapel-todays-integrity-preserves-churchs-mission-tomorrow.
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WEEK OF PRAYER: Sending hope to Chinese communities
by Brandon Elrod
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
EDITOR'S NOTE: The annual Week of Prayer for North American Missions, March 3-10, and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering provide support for missionaries who serve on behalf of Southern Baptists across North America. With a goal of $70 million, this year's offering theme is "Sending Hope." John*, a native of China, is a Week of Prayer missionary for the North American Mission Board. For more information, visit anniearmstrong.com. To read about other 2019 featured missionaries, visit anniearmstrong.com/missionaries-overview.
ALPHARETTA, Ga. (BP) -- While working on a doctoral degree in China, John* ardently sought to uncover the meaning of life. His homeland provided only a communist, atheistic worldview that yielded no sense of ultimate purpose or value for him.
Despite his academic success, John started wrestling with suicidal thoughts. Then his path crossed with American workers in China who encouraged him "to seek the satisfaction and strength from Jesus Christ," John recounted.
Jesus saved him, and once he graduated, he vowed to be like those who made such a huge impact on his life. At first, he thought that vow would lead him to minister in his native China but God opened John's eyes to the need for Chinese missionaries in North America.
After he made his vow, John anticipated spending 10 years in China working in his career field. When the time came for a promotion in his career, John worried that it would not be a good fit for him. While he remembered his vow, he also did not want to give up his comfortable work life.
Then, the Holy Spirit sent John a reminder.
"I was woken up one night by a Scripture, Luke 9:62," about not looking back once the hand is on the plow, John said. His wife supported his decision to leave his job, so their family moved to North America for him to pursue seminary education.
North American Mission Board team members visited his seminary looking for a potential Chinese church planting missionary who could start a church among Chinese expatriates.
John and his wife originally arrived with the expectation to receive education and return to China to pastor where the urgency seemed more pressing. Yet the couple began to accept that God had called them to stay in North America. Both his mentor and his wife encouraged him to stay. Then, his nonbelieving parents provided unlikely approval for the transition. As God impressed the need upon John's heart, he decided to plant a church among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese in North America.
John, who is a 2019 Week of Prayer missionary for NAMB's annual Annie Armstrong Easter Offering emphasis, has experienced several unforeseen challenges in attempting to reach his own ethnic group.
John and his wife set out to plant a church in a major city in 2015. As a once-successful businessman in China, John imagined that relationships would come with relative ease.
But he soon discovered that many who left China had moved to North America to experience a new way of life and fulfill their vision of freedom. They made the transition because they were wary of the ideologies in their home nation and were uninterested in adhering to what they perceived to be another restrictive worldview.
Over time, however, John started seeing his neighbors and friends encounter obstacles in their quest for peace. Some began retreating from their Buddhist spirituality or atheism and came to Christ. In their first three years as a church, John baptized 20 new believers, many of whom surrendered to Christ during their first visit to the church.
One such couple now serve as worship leaders, with the wife becoming the church's pianist. They engage in Bible study regularly throughout the week and attempt to reach out to their friends and family.
John has seen the church grow steadily and could not succeed without the help of Southern Baptist churches nationally and locally who provide support, guidance and resources.
In cities across North America, there are church planters attempting to reach Chinese populations who originally settled in urban centers to work and pursue the American dream. Concerns about China's recent actions to deter Christianity within their borders have required care in sharing the stories of Chinese Christians living abroad.
Gifts to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering help to make ministry to Chinese people in North America possible. To donate and learn more about the Annie Offering, visit anniearmstrong.com.
*Name and specific information withheld for security considerations.
Watch a video about John*:
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Planned Parenthood, allies challenge HHS pro-life rule
by Tom Strode
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
WASHINGTON (BP) -- Planned Parenthood and its allies are not going down without a fight to protect the tens of millions of dollars the country's No. 1 abortion provider receives in family planning money from the federal government.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the American Medical Association and more than 20 states are among the parties that filed lawsuits March 4 and 5 to block the Trump administration's new rule that eliminates family planning funds for organizations that perform or promote abortions.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final regulation Feb. 22 that bars the use of Title X money "to perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning." The rule requires "clear financial and physical separation" between Title X programs and non-Title X programs in which abortion is promoted as a method of family planning.
PPFA and the American Medical Association led a coalition of organizations that filed suit Tuesday (March 5) against HHS Secretary Alex Azar, urging a federal court in Eugene, Ore., to strike down the rule as unconstitutional. In other challenges to the rule:
-- 20 states, led by Oregon, and the District of Columbia sued March 5, also in Eugene.
-- California filed suit March 4.
-- Washington state announced Feb. 25 it would sue.
The new HHS regulation would cut about 10 percent of the government money that goes annually to Planned Parenthood, which reportedly receives $50-$60 million yearly through Title X. The Planned Parenthood Federation of American (PPFA) and its affiliates collected $563.8 million in government grants and reimbursements and performed more than 332,757 abortions in the most recent year for which statistics are available.
PPFA showed net assets of $1.88 billion at the end of the latest fiscal year.
Planned Parenthood's challenge to the new HHS rule came as no surprise to Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore and other pro-life leaders.
"We know this profit-driven industry, which devalues human life and exploits families, will do everything in its power to maneuver around this rule as they seek to use taxpayer dollars for abortion," said Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), after the final rule was announced.
"Without abortion, there would be no Planned Parenthood because, according to their own president, it is their 'core mission,'" he said.
PPFA President Leana Wen called the rule "unethical, illegal and harmful to public health" in a news release announcing her organization's lawsuit.
"[W]e will fight the Trump administration in the courts to protect everyone's fundamental right to health care," said Wen, who also charged the rule with forcing health-care professionals to withhold information from patients.
Pro-life leader Marjorie Dannenfelser said Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses "have treated the Title X program like their own multimillion-dollar slush fund" for years.
"Now, Planned Parenthood's allies are running to court to ensure taxpayers are forced to continue filling the coffers of the abortion industry," said Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List.
Xavier Becerra, California's attorney general, said the rule "denies patients access to critical healthcare services and prevents doctors from providing comprehensive and accurate information about medical care. President Trump treats women and their care as if this were 1920, not 2019."
The new HHS regulation does not prohibit nondirective counseling regarding abortion, but it ends the requirement that Title X recipients must provide abortion counseling and referral. It also does not reduce Title X funds.
In order for Planned Parenthood and other abortion performers to receive Title X funds, they must comply with the financial separation requirements within 120 days and with the physical separation mandates within a year.
The Reagan administration issued similar regulations in the 1980s, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld them in 1991. The Clinton administration rescinded those rules, however.
As the federal government's family planning program, Title X serves about four million Americans -- those of low income in particular.
The states that joined Oregon in the lawsuit were Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Messengers to the 2017 SBC meeting adopted a resolution calling for defunding of Planned Parenthood at all levels of government and denouncing the organization's "immoral agenda and practices." One of the ERLC's priorities in its 2019 legislative agenda is the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
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LifeWay Research looks for new faces in the pews
by Aaron Earls
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
NASHVILLE (BP) -- Many churches are not seeing new faces in the pews, according to a new study from Exponential conducted by LifeWay Research.
Six in 10 Protestant churches are plateaued or declining in attendance, according to data released March 6. More than half saw fewer than 10 people become new Christians in the past 12 months.
Exponential is a Virginia-based organization focusing on resources for church planting and multiplication.
"Growth is not absent from American churches," said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research. "But rapid growth through conversions is uncommon."
The research gives a clear picture of the state of Protestant churches in America today. Most have fewer than 100 people attending services each Sunday (57 percent), including 21 percent who average less than 50. Around 1 in 10 churches (11 percent) average 250 or more in worship.
Three in 5 (61 percent) pastors say their churches faced a decline in worship attendance or growth of 5 percent or less in the last three years. Almost half (46 percent) say their giving decreased or stayed the same from 2017 to 2018.
More than 2 in 5 churches (44 percent) only have one or fewer full-time staff members. Nearly 9 in 10 pastors (87 percent) say their church had the same or fewer number of full-time staff in 2018 as they had in 2017, including 7 percent who cut staff.
In 2018, 32 percent of churches were involved in some form of planting a new church; 3 percent added new multi-site campuses. Around 1 in 10 (12 percent) say they were directly or substantially involved in opening a new church in 2018, including 7 percent who were a primary financial sponsor or provided ongoing financial support to a church plant.
"The primary purpose of this study was to obtain a set of objective measures on churches' reproduction and multiplication behaviors today as well as to understand their core context of growth," said Todd Wilson, chief executive officer of Exponential. "By combining these measures, we can help churches think about multiplication."
Declining, plateaued or growing?
Twenty-eight percent of Protestant pastors say their church has seen worship attendance shrink by 6 percent or more compared to three years ago.
Another 33 percent say their church has remained within 5 percent, while 39 percent say their congregation has grown by at least 6 percent since the first quarter of 2016.
More than half of 18- to 44-year old pastors (55 percent) say their church is growing, while 33 percent of pastors 45 and older say the same.
Evangelical churches are more likely to be growing (42 percent) than their mainline counterparts (34 percent).
Less than a quarter (23 percent) of churches with an average worship attendance of fewer than 50 say they are growing, while most churches with 250 or more in attendance (59 percent) are growing.
Among denominations, Holiness (56 percent) and Baptist (45 percent) pastors are more likely to say their churches are growing than Methodists (33 percent) and Lutherans (25 percent).
Church conversions
The lack of growth in worship attendance in most churches is matched by a lack of new commitments to Christ last year.
Fifty-four percent of pastors say fewer than 10 people indicated a new commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior in 2018, including 8 percent who had none.
In some ways, however, those numbers mask deeper evangelistic concerns. When evaluating churches based on the number of conversions per 100 attendees, 67 percent had fewer than 10 per 100 people attending their church. Around a third (35 percent) had fewer than five new commitments for every 100 people attending their worship services.
Among churches of 250 and above, 18 percent say they had 10 conversions or more for every 100 in attendance.
While there are no major differences between evangelical and mainline churches in terms of new converts, denominational differences do exist.
A majority of Pentecostal pastors (57 percent) say they saw 10 or more new commitments to Christ in their church last year per 100 attendees. The next closest denominations are Lutherans (39 percent), Holiness (38 percent) and Baptists (35 percent).
A quarter of Methodist (25 percent) and Presbyterian or Reformed pastors (23 percent) say they had 10 or more new commitments to Jesus in 2018 per 100 attendees. Half of Methodist pastors (50 percent) had fewer than five new commitments last year.
"Much work has been done to go deeper on measuring church health," said McConnell. "But it is still helpful to look at the observable factors of 'noses, nickels and new commitments.' Strategies, programs and rules-of-thumb work differently depending on the trajectory of a church."
Methodology: A phone survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors was conducted by LifeWay Research Jan. 14–30, 2019. The calling list used a random sample stratified by church size, drawn from a list of all Protestant churches. Quotas were used to maintain the correct proportion of each church size. Responses were weighted by region to more accurately reflect the population. Each interview was conducted with the senior pastor, minister or priest of the church called. The sample provides 95 percent confidence that the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 3.2 percent. Margins of error are higher in subgroups.
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Truce ends Jack Phillips' religious liberty battle
by Diana Chandler
Date: March 06, 2019 - Wednesday
DENVER(BP) -- The Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) and Christian cake baker Jack Phillips are ending a six-year legal battle over whether Phillips can refuse business projects that violate his religious beliefs.
But the truce leaves unanswered the larger question of whether the First Amendment frees proprietors to limit their business to dealings that honor their religious beliefs, Phillips' attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) told Baptist Press today (March 6).
In yesterday's truce, the CCRC dropped its latest discrimination charge against Phillips, and Phillips in turn dropped a 2018 religious bias lawsuit against the commission.
The CCRC approached ADF March 4 with the possibility of dropping the charges against Phillips, ADF senior counsel Jim Campbell said, following the discovery of audio recordings that highlighted potential CCRC prejudice in the case. It's not clear whether the two developments are related.
"Just late last week we uncovered a recording," Campbell said, "with two of the current [CCRC] commissioners ... publicly stating their agreement with anti-religious comments that the Supreme Court expressly condemned." There's "evidence of this anti-religious hostility and how that might have impacted the state's decision to settle this and to drop its case," he said, "because we were starting to find a lot of information that was showing that hostility."
The truce ends the 2018 case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Elenis, the latest case involving Phillips and the state.
"This really just has a huge impact on Jack's life," Campbell said, "because it gets the state to back off him and hopefully allows him to get on with his life, and get back to focusing on his cake art and serving his community and doing all the things that he used to do before he got tied up in over six and a half years of legal battles."
Kristen Waggoner, ADF senior vice president of the U.S. legal division, discussed the audio recordings in an ADF press release.
"A Colorado state legislator recently disclosed that he spoke in November 2018 to a current commissioner who expressed the belief that 'there is anti-religious bias on the Commission,'" Waggoner said. "And just last week, ADF attorneys uncovered statements from a 2018 public meeting in which two commissioners voiced their support for comments that a previous commissioner, Diann Rice, made in 2015. Those comments, which the U.S. Supreme Court sternly condemned in its ruling in favor of Phillips last year, called religious freedom 'a despicable piece of rhetoric.'"
In the latest case, Phillips had sued the CCRC after it charged him with discrimination for refusing to bake a birthday cake celebrating a transition from male to female identity. The customer, transgender attorney Autumn Scardina, ordered a pink cake with blue frosting. In January, the U.S. District Court of Colorado limited Phillips' bias lawsuit against the CCRC, stripping him of the right to pursue compensatory damages against most of the defendants.
Phillips' battle with the CCRC dates to the 2012 case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2018. The high court ruled partially in Phillips' favor, saying the CCRC showed anti-religious bias against the baker. But the court left open the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse work that promotes an LGBT lifestyle.
"But there are a number of other cases that are quickly working their way up to the Supreme Court that raise these broader religious freedom questions," Campbell said, including "the issue of whether creative professionals who serve all people can decline requests for custom creations that express messages or celebrate events in conflict with their faith."
Similar cases involving Southern Baptist florist Barronelle Stutzman in Washington State, Telescope Media Group in Minnesota, and Hands On Originals apparel company in Lexington, Ky., all have the potential of reaching the Supreme Court, Campbell said.
The CCRC has not agreed to honor Phillips' freedom of conscience, Campbell said, but only agreed to drop the latest case.
"We're hopeful it is something that will be permanent and that the state will respect Jack in the long term," Campbell said, "but in terms of the agreement, it does not apply to anything beyond this one prosecution."
Because of the CCRC's 2012 action against Phillips, he no longer bakes wedding cakes which comprised 40 percent of his income.
"It's our belief that he can go back to creating wedding cakes," Campbell said, although the 2018 Supreme Court ruling didn't clearly clarify the question. "At this point Jack has not yet gotten back in the wedding industry, and he has to cross some logistical hurdles before he can do that."